Every weekend I pull out a pack of Hormel Black Label (UNCOOKED) bacon from my fridge. This is by far the best "supermarket bacon" available, and, if cooked right, tastes like pure heaven (and pure heart attack, but hell, I've got more important things to worry about. Like whether or not I'll have enough bacon next week.)

Be careful, though. I've seen a lot of stores carry Hormel Black Label, but most likely it's fake. Unless you're dirt poor or enjoy this stuff, do NOT get the precooked junk. Definitely not worth it! I'd rather eat the package it came in.

Tip: If you're pan frying, put simply anything over the pan to cover it. If it has a lid, great. Just make sure there's an opening so the steam can get out. This reduces the risk of splatter greatly, although you have to be careful when you're flipping the bacon. (Pretty obvious but I see a lot of you still complaining about it...)

I have to give my kids credit for this one. They wanted to make bacon that was twirly--curled around like a corkscrew. I thought about it and decided we might be able to use drinking straws as the form. So we wrapped bacon strips around a straw, like the red stripe on a candy cane. Then we cooked it the normal way in the microwave. It worked quite well and the kids were very excited about the way it looked. The straws will get very melty and sometimes are hard to separate from the bacon. But it's a fun experience for the kids.

My brother has a Makin' Bacon, and I am not a fan. The one I have used, with consistently good results for about eight years, is the BaconWave. (Walmart.com has them, but the retail store does not.) It holds the bacon strips on their edges, and quite a lot of fat renders out. It's clear, with a few little bacony bits in it, just as Michael described for the Makin' Bacon. With the BaconWave come skewers to hold the ends of the strips in place, but I've never used them. One caution is that the instructions for the BaconWave generally have too-long cooing times, so be prepared to experiment.

Some folks mentioned how fatty standard American bacon is. I agree. But John F. Martin (based in Lancaster PA, I believe) makes excellent bacon -- a nice smoky flavor, but not overpowering, and significantly less fat than national brands. The bacon comes in regular and low salt, but they taste equally good to me. Only annoyance (a minor one) is that the strips are sometimes not uniformly thick.

John F Martin does make good bacon. I don't live far from there. Wegman's (the best supermarket in the world, imo) sell an applewood smoked reduced salt bacon that is VERY, VERY good!!! Go to Wegmans.com for locations.

I usually bake my bacon on a rack at 350 for about 20 minutes. There's no need to slow cook it and you'll get very straight and evenly cooked bacon. You can even flavor it with spices, maple syrup or whatever you like and get the same results.

400 degrees aluminum baking sheet with parchment paper on it. If you get creative you can fit a whole pound on one sheet pan. Also I find this method keeps the bacon fat fairly "clean" if you want to harvest it for later use.

Just in the past month or so, I've discovered the wonders of slow baking bacon in the oven, partially thanks to this site.

One morning, my wife wanted waffles. She's grown accustomed to my raised (yeasted) waffle recipe, which I usually let rise overnight. But I needed it for the morning, and it needs at least an hour for the yeast to ferment.

So I figured it was the perfect time to try out the slow baking method. I put the oven at 200 degrees (as suggested here), and the bacon cooked for about 90 minutes like that. No mess. No burnt stains on the aluminum foil (as I've seen before at high temperature). Perfectly clear drippings.

The bacon wasn't quite done at that point, so I turned the oven up slightly as I started to make the waffles. The flavor was UNBELIEVABLE. Texture was fantastic -- uniformly crispy with just the right amount of chewy. I had a guest for brunch as well as my wife; both said it was about the best bacon they had ever had.

Higher temperatures do the trick, but few comments seem to discuss trying the slow baking method. Yes, you need extra time, but some weekend morning when you're up early and the rest of the family is sleeping in, put the bacon in and just let it slow cook until people get up. You can always raise the temperature to finish it if you need to, but any additional time is worth it.

I'm really surprised at how perfect your grilled bacon looked. So much so that it almost doesn't look real. I've grilled bacon before and it doesn't take but two minutes with the grill on low for that stuff to cause a pretty decent flare up and there wasn't one burned spot on your grilled bacon.

The instructions on my box of bacon say if preparing in an oven, cook at 400 degrees for 15-18 minutes. This seems to be in between the broiling method you used in part I and the slow cooking method you used in part II.

Most painless way for me is to put half-length strips in a cold 12-inch thick- bottomed SS pan (non-teflon). I stumble out of bed, lay in the bacon, turn burner to about 1.5 of 10 (electric burner). Don't use any oil on pan; you want it to stick--the bacon strips are super flat; even the fat is crunchy. Go back to bed. About an hour or so later, smell wakes me up, and 'm happy! While making the breakfast, you can play around with the finishing heat. The remaining bacon fat should be crystal clear.

I was getting a bacon and egg sandwich at work, where the cook makes it on the spot. I always ask for 'super-extra crispy' so one day he submerges the bacon in the hot cooking oil that was used for home fries. Delicious! Heavenly! and yes, Super-extra crispy! Soon my other co-workers were asking for it the same way, so he just put the entire package of bacon in the oil every morning.

As other have said, in the UK bacon is is 90% meat, with some fat round the edge. I've played with the sugestions on this site (thanks!) to cook cheap bulk offers of bacon from the supermarket. Once cooked, you can scoff a slice straight from the freezer! Sounds nasty but is nice.

The disadvantage is the potential erosion of your economical frozen stash.

If you try it, you won't thank me for this observation... it's so tempting.

If you're like me, you like the low temperature method, but you find the "extremely straight" bacon a little unappetizing looking. To fix this, take a square of tin foil and crumple it up. Then, un-crumple it and then lay the bacon on top of the tin foil and stick it in the oven.

When done, the bacon will not be really straight, and it will look like what you get when you pan fry it.